


A Crime Scene of Crows

by aderyn



Category: Sherlock (TV)
Genre: (a murder of) crows, Pre Reichenbach, References to Suicide, Solstice, and a kiss, mistletoe and myth, not necessarily S2 timeline compliant
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-01-04
Updated: 2013-01-04
Packaged: 2017-11-23 16:19:31
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,146
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/624135
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/aderyn/pseuds/aderyn
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>The body washes up on a Monday, three days before Christmas. There are fairy lights twined through the Poison Garden at Chelsea and bundles of mistletoe in the flower market on Columbia Road. All the fresh light of London and all the old bitterness, woven and bound in an inexorable pair. </p>
<p>Sherlock is delighted.</p>
            </blockquote>





	A Crime Scene of Crows

**Author's Note:**

> For Moranion, with so many thanks for the Poison Garden and the [darkness and light.](http://archiveofourown.org/works/607093?view_adult=true) Thank you to [BlackMorgan](http://archiveofourown.org/users/BlackMorgan/pseuds/BlackMorgan) for the Columbia Road flower market, to [Songster](http://songstersmiscellany.tumblr.com/tagged/aderyn) (again) for the crows, and to [Professorfangirl](http://archiveofourown.org/users/lizeckhart/pseuds/professorfangirl), for the pomegranates, the grounding, and the all-night writing-with.

**  
**

_“Crow looked around him and spotted a box that glowed around the edges. Daylight, he thought.”—from “Crow Brings the Daylight,” Inuit myth retold by. S.E. Schlosser_   


 

The body washes up on a Monday, three days before Christmas. There are fairy lights twined through the Poison Garden at Chelsea and bundles of mistletoe in the flower market on Columbia Road. All the fresh light of London and all the old bitterness, woven and bound in an inexorable pair.  
  
The body (male, about 25) is washed clean of evidence. The dark half of the year has begun (a sliver, to wane.)  
  
Sherlock is delighted.  
  
"You look as though ..." says John.  
  
"What?" Sherlock seems to have acquired a glow.  
  
 "I was going to say you look like you've been given an early Christmas gift, but that would be ..."  
  
"Entirely accurate," Sherlock says, and kisses John on the mouth because apparently that's what you do when you've been given a Lea-washed body as a present.  
  
"Sherlock," John says.  He's just had the strangest vision of pepperberry wreaths heaped on a table, heard crows calling, smelled the dark edge of a wood, leaf litter and all. There's a candle-wick warmth at either temple, and that's all.  
  
Except for the sensation of tripping forwards and tipping, not falling, off a high roof into a heap of fresh greens.  
  
It is the strangest thing.  
  
 *******  
The body washes up on a Monday.  
  
When they arrive on the scene it's surrounded by crows. Well, Lestrade and Donovan and police and crows.  
  
"Maybe a murder," Lestrade says, finger-circling the tape and the visitors with their harsh calls, grinning a little.  
  
"A crime scene of crows, then," says John.  
  
Sherlock is delighted.  
  
His shadow slips across on the body (male, dark-haired, about 25, no marks); a particle of light off the river, silvery, both quick and warm, catches him unawares, and he blinks.

*******  
The crows aren’t just curious, if you had to say, family calls, familiar rustlings, head-tiltings. There’s  a bit of the old wood in their voices, a glint off a claw here, in an eye there, windows in their flights.  
  
"Curious, are they," Donovan says.  She seems in a good humour despite the timing, the lack of evidence, the presence of the freak.

"Maybe," John says, looks at the birds, touches wonderingly his lower lip.

_What have we agreed to live through._

*******  
Sherlock seems delighted. His shadow barely keeps up when he leaps up, gravel sifting seed-like from his fingers. The crows lift off in a line ( _sorrow, mirth, girl, boy, death, wedding_ ), alarm calls, sparks, a bit of afternoon for each to clutch.  
  
"Not a murder,"  Sherlock calls, spins once, eyes the departures, turns round again, let’s the second centrifuge the grin.  
  
"And you're…not  happy about that are you," Donovan says over her arms. There's a feather in her hair, but she doesn’t seem to notice.  
  
"Mark Branwell, twenty-six,” Sherlock says, holding  his phone aloft ,"Lived alone, worked in his uncle’s flower shop,  history of depression, in love with two former schoolmates at once, a man and a woman, attempted robbery at sixteen, a chemist’s, suicidal,  tried twice before, once when he was  fourteen, dug a hole in the back garden, wrote a note, once at twenty, poisoned himself with belladonna ,left a note; suicide; inform the parents so they can make arrangements before the holiday."

"Sherlock," Lestrade says, eyes skyward. _You’re sure._ He's suddenly sensed greens, a fire, the faint crackling scent of holiday dinner. _Another sorrow you’re sure of._

"Mark Branwell, twenty-six,” Sherlock says, lowering the mobile, glancing at John.

“Pulled in two directions,” John says, exhales. “A shame.”

There are spaces where the birds were, the resting places washed clean.

*******  
“Are you going to tell me,” John says in the cab, “…how you saw all of that?”

“No,” Sherlock says.

Not this time.

He’s descended a little,sobered, folded.  His breath fogs the glass. There’s down on his sleeve and river-mud on his coat, but he doesn’t seem to mind.  The skyline’s tugging at his eyelids, the old bitterness creeping in with the light, the moving window  filtering, refracting, giving the city back fractured and new.

His hand circles John’s sleeve, pulls it down;there’s a flicker in his left eye as he tilts towards, smiles.

_I'd do it again._

“Are you,” John says,”all right?”

There are some things for which only one kind of contact will do, a twining, tree-climbing variant, not the parasite but the all-heal, not the broom but the bough, a particle of light at the heart of the wood.

**_***_ **

_Mark Branwell used to walk sometimes in the Poison Garden, brooding on all the sap there, the seeds, the bright beauty of the blooms, up from the blackness of the heart of the earth. Out of the dark heart come the brightest  things, he’d think, the bloom and the fruit. We go down into the earth, under the leaves, to this we return; we spend the dark half dreaming.  It turns, this body; it tilts and with each tilt another wink, a glint in a crow’s eye, off the toenail of a crow. These things we come back to._

_Listen, bird-boy, the seed said, the sap said; it’s hard, not to return to the egg of the earth; gild, crack, emerge._

_Begin your life again._

**_***_ **

It’s been awhile. It’s been awhile since either of them thought about going down, not coming up.

What heals can kill, John thinks; what kills can heal.  And what lives will naturally seek another life.

I know, John thinks, what that means.

Balance is beautiful; oblivion too.  But breathing --blinking, shaken, green, oh-god surprised—is more so.

**_***_ **

_Aconitum lycoctonum,_ Sherlock writes _,(Wolfsbane), Symphoricarpos album(Snowberry), Solanum dulcamara (Nightshade) Atropa belladonna, Viscum album, biological  response modifier?_

_Corvus corone, (Carrion Crow) common in the UK._

_Suicide not (statistically) more common in winter._

_Corvids --mourn their dead?_

_(Not) attracted to shiny things._

_The beauty,_ Sherlock writes, _is that we aren’t compelled, that we don’t just channel what the world says, and it says great deal. We process. We reason. We decide._

_I’d follow you earthward, skyward, armed, unarmed, disarmed._

_And you me._

*******

The lights are just coming on outside, over garden and market, the Thames and the Lea.

 “John,” Sherlock says from the window, “Things go to ground this time of year. Even the criminals.”

“We don’t,” says John, cheerful again, as the cups settle in his hands and the wreath settles on the door.  
  
“Maybe not,” Sherlock says.  
  
 _I didn’t delete the solstice._  
  
“But just in case I’d prefer not to go down alone.”

“You,” says John (wreaths, seeds, crows calling, an infinite tumbling of greens), _never will._

Sherlock takes a cup, takes a sip, passes it back.

It is the strangest thing, the light of the world, the long fall into the earth, the deep continual sweetness of breath.  


**Author's Note:**

> The Poison Garden at Chelsea is fictional, based on [The Poison Garden, Alnwick Garden, Northumberland](http://www.alnwickgarden.com/explore/whats-here/the-poison-garden) and [Chelsea Physic Garden](http://www.chelseaphysicgarden.co.uk/).  
> Lea: derived from a Celtic root "lug"- 'bright or light', [Oxford Dictionary of London Place Names](http://www.amazon.co.uk/Dictionary-London-Place-Names-D-Mills/dp/019956678X#reader_019956678X).  
> Thames: from Middle English Temese,from the Celtic name for the river, Tamesas , which likely meant "dark.”  
> [Pepperberry](http://www.google.com/imgres?imgurl=http://www.marketflowersmpls.com/_images/glossary/Pepperberry.jpg&imgrefurl=http://www.marketflowersmpls.com/flowergloss2.html&h=592&w=800&sz=191&tbnid=t0x1ppfH7p26sM:&tbnh=90&tbnw=122&zoom=1&usg=__Oj9Iv6hxWjB8lzWW18mWpiRNPk4=&docid=PhQIAtM9N0zTZM&hl=en&sa=X&ei=rdTbUJLaJoHF0QGj5oDoDw&ved=0CFIQ9QEwBA&dur=1456)
> 
> [Mistletoe, Viscum album, (also known as All Heal, Birdlime, Golden Bough, Wood of the Cross,and Witches Broom) in Columbia Road Flower Market](http://www.plant-lore.com/1610/mistletoe/).  
> [Corvus corone, the Carrion Crow](http://www.thetimes.co.uk/tto/life/courtsocial/article3529277.ece)  
> [Mourning and cognition in crows and other birds; “crow funerals”](http://jonlieffmd.com/blog/death-of-a-bird-mourning-and-advanced-cognition-in-birds)  
> [Solstice Crow](http://www.flickr.com/photos/bryanto/4201543625/)  
> [ Yule Crow](http://pinterest.com/pin/246642517064421169/)


End file.
